 Episode 3 of the Anthony Anderson Show is brought to you by USGoldCoins.com, that's 1-800-HOTCOIN and MEZZYGRILL, that's MEZZYGRILL.COM and MOUNTAINGOX.COM, that's M-T-G-O-X.COM Greetings everyone, this is Anthony coming at you from New York City on the Anthony Anderson Show on OnlyOneTV.com Today we're here with a forest gardener, this is Mark from RootsToFruits.biz, how's it going brother? It's going really well, thank you for having me Anthony. Yeah, it's a pleasure, it's a pleasure. We actually met yesterday for the first time, we'd known each other through Facebook and and the internet and sharing the love of food forests and forest gardening and it was very unexpected surprise to have you on today. Oh thank you. Pretty cool man, pretty cool. So tell me about forest gardening, what does forest gardening food forest mean to you? How did you get into it? I got into it about five years ago after I became interested in permaculture design and sustainability and really sparked by my love for food so trying to figure out how to grow my own foods because I learned that that's the best way to get fresh food and fruits and everything like that and then I picked up Dave Jackie's books Edible Forest Gardens volume 1 and 2 and was fortunate enough that he came to Michigan to teach a workshop and so I was able to go to his workshop and after that long story short I just became addicted to growing plants and became sort of a plant geek so I started doing lots of research and buying plants and planting them and growing them and figuring out what they like to grow and all these different things so it's been kind of an intuitive journey for me. It's kind of sparked by a lot for food pretty much. Yeah same here. So through that though I've gotten interested in you know all these different things that relate to sustainability and you know simplified living and whatnot. Cool. So to me forest gardening is basically the most simple way to put it would be using nature's model of gardening to produce the things that humans need to make a living on earth so food and fiber and fuels and our medicines and our enjoyment. Good point. And our healthy living spaces. Yeah. So using useful plants and creating ecosystems is basically the the general underlying principle of forest gardening is creating an ecosystem that will sustain itself but also sustain us as humans. Sure. Sure. Do you see forest gardening playing a role in the future as far as sustainability like the whole eco-village movement? Do you see it taking on? Definitely maybe not so much and I mean eco-village movement as far as I know is definitely utilizing forest gardening and permaculture design in their planning but I see forest gardening having a very powerful impact on farming and agriculture in general because a lot of people know now thanks to people like Michael Pollan and all these all this publicity that farming is getting right now that the way that we grow food currently the way we source calories is basically eroding topsoil and polluting land and whatnot so forest gardening offers a lot to farmers because it allows them to incorporate perennial plants into their farming systems and essentially allows farms to return to the underlying principle of being able to pass them on to generations that come after each farmer so I see a really powerful impact on farming and there's some great examples and really really forward thinking cutting-edge farmers out there that are doing this that are planting trees and a lot of them are developing or expanding on markets has already exist like with the chestnut and the hazelnut which some people would prefer to as like niche markets but they're actually worldwide you know their commodity crops so yeah definitely I see that having huge impact and then on the flip side also with homeowners and people that you know individuals it also I feel like we'll have a significant impact along with growing vegetables in this whole victory gardening you know home garden resurgence that you know the most seed sales and history is what I've been reading like the past few years they've just been increasing fedco seeds in Maine which I buy a lot of seeds from last year put out of Bolton and one week they sold like a hundred grand in seeds which they'd never done before so yeah it's definitely people are seeing that growing food at home is a worthwhile investment and a few people you know a small number of people are seeing that it's actually a more worthwhile investment than a lot of the financial investment instruments that we're using currently in our economy so yeah I feel that those two I feel like because you have to have those two really fair to work out so this idea of people planting jungles in their front and backyard and then farmers planting trees and you know producing bulk calories and then people growing fruits and vegetables at home because those those are what have the most transport and they're basically water weight so people grow them at home it's the most sensible it's the most energy efficient you could literally pick your berries eat them or preserve them right then so yeah from my for my experience I feel like that is forest gardening has the most potential there really cool really cool you mentioned the farmers taking part what kind of stuff would they be most interested in planting um well in terms of forest gardening and in like food production in particular definitely the tree crops nut trees in particular okay there's a national nut growers association and then most states also have in nut growers associations cool and there's a lot of research going into improving varieties of walnuts and hickories and chestnuts and hazelnuts as like the four main northern to some of them more mild southern climates so those four nuts and then the hazelnut as a shrub are probably going to be some of the main because if we look at our system right now it's corn and soybean and then third and then third is like wheat and other cereal grains so chestnut which most people don't know is nutrient wise and calorie wise very similar to rice okay so from a market perspective that is most advantageous for farmers because they can produce something that any almost anyone could eat even if you have not allergies most people can eat chestnuts so they're quick to bear within eight years and so things like that but beyond just the specific crops the systems that farmers are starting to use more and more our systems knows agroforestry and there's quite a range there's like habitat windbreaks and buffers soil stabilization and then a huge one is this forest farming concept where we're using trees in conjunction with other plants that are useful and have some yield so there's a system known as alley cropping that is really popular that a lot of these hazelnut growers are using to transition into perennial income streams they grow they'll grow barley or rye or any you know they'll grow a number of annuals in rows between their rows of hazelnuts or chestnuts and so from year one they can they can reap some income from that planting and then you know up to like five to ten years when the trees start yielding they can phase out a lot of their alley crops and those crops become their main income that's cool they can move on and start doing more plantings and use those as seed source and whatnot so alley cropping I feel like is it's catching on there's a lot of the farming conferences and the farmers that do a lot of these talks are demonstrating what they're doing on their farms with alley cropping and showing that it's actually profitable that it's working yeah so that's really important and because no matter what is I mean we can be so into this cutting-edge stuff but if it doesn't make financial sense for them right at least within a couple years I don't think they're gonna go for it right that's that's the biggest with farmers now there's also there's also a kind of edge to that as well because some of these things are things people don't really eat commonly in America chestnuts and hazelnuts are more rare in Europe it's very it's more much more common much more traditional yeah so there's also that cultural aspect of kind of like that rescaling idea that people will have to learn how to use these these foods and yeah cook with them yeah so that's maybe a longer term process but you know if the farmers are providing it it's well I feel like it yeah and they can just put it into products too I mean they could be put in chestnut flour yeah to pancakes and you know whatever yeah there's a farmer who's doing this who's growing stuff like this and a few of the interviews I've heard from him he makes this joke you know Cheetos is like well you can take chestnuts and you can make Cheetos with them so you can make anything with chestnuts it's just a simple starch and it can be ground into flour so you could theoretically have yeah just not junk food I mean just my Cheetos cool very cool so roots to fruits what's the story about that how did that kind of come into fruition so to speak I'm sure that's come up before well the idea sort of germinated me my lifelong friend Trevor Newman we grew up together I knew his brother since I was in preschool we he was still in high school I was kind of phasing out of going to college and following that path okay so restructure through restructuring my life and trying to figure out what I wanted to do what my life purpose was we all we kind of synchronistically fell upon forest gardening and permaculture design and along with my brother and so we kind of like you know with their collective energy we're able to like really get each other pumped up and try a bunch of different things and grow a bunch of stuff so just sort of a natural evolution of that we're all gardening we're all doing all this stuff we ended up meeting some friends through through some mutual connections who are already doing this for a few years and had had semi-established forest gardens and with my background I used to do graphic design so I had a natural tendency for design so we just you know I don't know exactly how it evolved but we just one day thought well why don't we just kind of why don't we rethink this idea of landscaping and the way that we interact with our landscape instead of using lawns and these boring useless plants that people just trim and don't really harvest anything off of why don't we create a business that helps people grow food so just sort of it was very intuitive it wasn't like we didn't really plan it out just kind of happened and it we rolled with it we thought it was a great idea and we're able to land a few jobs with our experience in our own gardens and you know working on farms we felt like we had enough experience to help people make it happen so we were able to land some jobs and those went well and we learned a lot and we figured it's a good way it's a good thing to do it seems like there's enough interest so roots to fruits as an outstands is an ecological design firm and it's currently Trevor and I as like me designers and consultants and our main mission really is to help people take their resource consuming landscape and make a resource producing very cool so taking this idea of like a net loss investment in your landscape and turning into in that game mm-hmm so we consult for folks we've done some consulting for one farmer so far we're trying to work in to getting into the agricultural field yeah so consulting has been pretty big for us also design has been our main thing we do anywhere from very simple design to full master plan designs our most recent one was like a 30-acre master plan for up to 10-year phases cool and then we've also been propagating plants and and then also planting these gardens and maintaining them so that's kind of our broad range of services and now we're moving more into education and giving workshops and presentations to our community and trying to kind of stoke that fire of you know getting people interested in this up because it's kind of a it's a new thing so that's worked out really well for us we when we describe to people what we do they're excited and they think wow I've got this lawn that I just cut and I'm wasting all this money and I don't get anything out of it and yeah so it's kind of like this thing that's starting to click in people's minds so do people understand quickly how easy it can be once it's established today does that sink in on like their first workshop or I mean because it's really compared to the Victory Garden style with like the raised veg and the raised beds and everything it's just the forest gardening seems to be so much easier once everything is mulched and you have it all planted and like your mint and this and that and it's all kind of filled in and I just really want people to really get that how easy it is definitely in our experience like presenting to people that do garden already they're more apt to comprehend what that means especially people we've we've had a lot of clients that are kind of into this native plant movement so they kind of get it because they're trying they're looking at ecosystems and they're seeing how these plants grow with each other so for them it makes sense yeah but I think conceptually a lot of people have had trouble we've had to do a lot of kind of like mentoring with some of our clients to help them understand how these things evolve and what's going on why are we planting like you're saying like why are we planting mint and white clover with our fruit bush yeah so yeah so we've actually we've used kind of our design edge to make visual visual diagrams and kind of like make it a little more sensory for for folks so they can see it and so yeah we people are people are definitely getting it the edible landscaping service that we've kind of been marketing it I think makes instantly makes a lot more sense and the forest gardening is maybe like a more esoteric if you will yeah form of edible landscaping yeah that we're trying to like wean people into definitely because all the edible landscapes we've done are essentially forest gardens I mean we're just not calling it that so so yeah people are definitely slowly it's starting to make sense and they're seeing that they're seeing that the work they're putting into it for example the first two years when they have their then when they plant to the forest garden they have to do to mulch and maybe do some occasional weeding until the plants start to mature they're seeing that investment is like very worthwhile because eventually everything will be so mature that the weeding and work will be very minimal the main work is harvesting really because that that actually does take a lot a lot of time to harvest all those berries and preserve them so yeah my mom was complaining the other week she's like because you picked like about two gallons I guess of raspberries she's like it took me two hours sweating and there's mosquitoes and I was like jeez so sorry you know yeah yeah enjoy it is work though especially in the summertime when it's like beaming down on you and you know the gooseberries and you're getting thorns yeah some of those plants are definitely thorny yeah it gets it gets old for some people so yeah kind of tying back into the farming thing there is a cultural aspect to it so you know over the past 50 years or so our culture is kind of degraded and work has kind of become this service kind of idea and labor has kind of been relegated to the lower classes I don't want to say classes we don't have sure we do have class system but yeah it's informal um so I think yeah but a lot of the folks I've been meeting that are into gardening and they're like realizing how important it is to have clean fresh food realizing there's a sacrifice especially the csa movement a lot of the csa is which for folks that don't understand what that is is basically like a community supported farming where people invest in their their vegetable share for a year and they help the farmer grow it but with that movement a lot of people a lot of the csa is required their members to work a certain amount of hours so within that realm of like local food there are people that have had experience on farms and no labor and so to them it makes sense you know people that are canning and stuff like that they realize it's not I mean it's not easy in the sense of like taking your frozen food out of the freezer and microwaving it right is maybe you could define that as easy yeah but it is easy if you this is one way I like to word it when people ask me this question is if you think of all the energy that's going into those raspberries you bought at Whole Foods that are in a plastic container it's a whole system of energy invested in that one container that you don't even see or even think about so yeah first of all the field had to be tilled those plants had to be propagated that had to be planted watered maintained prunes some sort of nutrient had to be put on them then they had to be harvested sorted packed the plastic had to be manufactured the trucks had to be managed it's a huge system so there's so much energy going into that that there's a lot of work and so picking two gallons of raspberries and sweating and maybe getting bit by some mosquitoes is like nothing compared to that energy such a big system that's crazy and so on the cultural level I feel like that's maybe the biggest thing with permaculture design and the things we're doing is that people don't think in systems generally so our whole society is this very complex system so we don't even see the energy inputs into a lot of the things we do so and we don't feel them so some of those things are foreign like work seems hard to some people but if they realize how much how much of a slave fossil fuel is for us they see that their sweat and their labor is very easy compared to what fossil fuels are doing for our car or buses or airplanes or whatever yeah good point good point speaking of cars you're based out of michigan right uh-huh and what have you seen with Detroit and the whole resurgence of I mean what's happening with the degraded land over there the abandoned land um so in Detroit it's been getting a lot of headlines lately a lot of people are starting to talk about it and hear about it um in my very I have very sparse experience actually there I've visited and I've met a lot of people that are actually there doing the work but for my observations there um there's a lot of abandoned lands a lot of neighborhoods that are virtually empty no tenants or people living there taking care of it so what's happening is low housing prices uh is drawing in a lot of young people artists and entrepreneurs and mainly from what I've read from the statistics people with college degrees and things like that are moving in taking advantage of all these opportunities and there's a huge push and movement around this food security issue because there are so many people that um they can't because of their circumstances are are unable or it's made very difficult for them to acquire healthy fresh nutrient dense food so there's actually a very large movement centered around that and I think I feel like everything kind of um is maybe a byproduct of that or a subset of that so there's organizations that are setting up community farms and gardens there's um one fellow I met a few years ago uh Patrick Crouch he's works for earthworks farms which is run by a soup kitchen and they donate most of their produce to the homeless mm-hmm um so there's several things that are set up like that um there's now some market farmers people are like seeing that you can actually make a living like on three acres in Detroit selling vegetables um so it's kind of like this huge uh it's a mix and then there's also this other aspect of what people would call like hipster culture these young people um who are starting these little businesses entrepreneurial sort of things um there's kind of a strong foodie culture a lot of people really interested in food and bringing back like the preservation methods of the past doing meat curing and fermented foods and things like that so sure it's um it's really cool from my perspective it's like I feel like that is such a great model for every urban center because um it's likely that urban centers are going to become more and more populated but also more and more strained for energy because of the energy usage that they take so yeah Detroit's a great example it's a city that kind of fell apart and now people are taking the infrastructure that's there and they're making it alive and like kind of like bringing back this whole community feel and the food is really essential to that because people have to eat and um so food access is increasing I would say and um definitely the community aspect is I would say is definitely increasing um I have family that lived in Detroit grew up in Detroit and um they saw it they kind of saw it degrade and they moved away and some stayed um I had an who stayed there up until a few years ago um and she was trying to kind of like work within those systems and it was very difficult but now I feel like maybe the advantages are kind of coming full swing and it's becoming a little more the doors are opening more for people that want to do these things um there's a lot of money coming into it so yeah so with the whole car culture the call culture car culture is kind of phasing out um realistically it's phasing out and Detroit is gonna inherit a new um it's gonna inherit a new symbolism I feel like beyond cars because there's no cars made there anymore yeah really yeah it's like I think they're gonna see a big rebirth of the old style that's a big mentality too that people kind of have to think about is is that we're like living in this little blip yes of abnormality and we're gonna get back to that whole thing and it's all like back to living with you know manure as fertilizer and you know everything's done by hand and we're getting back to that really soon so I think we're in that 100 200 year yes weird period maybe a little longer if you look at whatever the middle ages and stuff and going back a couple thousand years but in the past 200 300 it's been very strange oh definitely it's been unusual for our species I mean for the planet for any species really yeah um it's amazing that everything's adapted the way it has I mean it feels like obviously it's in a bad situation for a lot of other species and stuff but considering what they've faced I mean humans have done so much unfortunately so much destructiveness and compared to what they could do have you seen the man who planted trees that animated I haven't but I many people have recommended oh yeah it's on youtube and just google the man who planted trees on youtube and it's a it should be a four-part animated film that was made probably 20 years ago or something okay and it's about this he was a sheep herder a shepherd living in kind of near Provence in France and he would plant a hundred acorns a day wow as he took his sheep out and he it was barren land because it was all deforested because of coal they were taking charcoal and you know they I mean that was the whole thing so all this forest was totally wiped away and you would see like the the author or the narrator of the story he was a young man when this all happened and he was hiking through these desolated areas and he'd find like abandoned villages with like a fountain but the fountain was dry so this was like a spring that someone funneled in and then they built their village around the spring wow but now since they cut all the trees down the fountain was gone and so this guy had been planting probably from like 1910 to 1940 or something and he reforested like a 20 mile by 20 mile section wow and all the water came back that's awesome yeah totally reforested so it was something like 20,000 oak trees wow and just like huge like huge and that was one guy just planting seeds yeah wow and that that was with a very small budget too so if you think with if someone with resources really gets into this idea yes and they really go for it I feel like that's it yeah that's I mean really once millions start getting put into this idea wow yeah it'll catch on really fast yeah yeah check out check out that show you'll like it it's like 40 minutes long it's great that sounds awesome wow that's that's inspiring because that's kind of like what we're doing except what we're doing on a very small scale we're planting these seeds and yeah yeah well luckily with the internet now like when people see the website and they get inspired and they see your you know what you've designed so far and that's just like really inspirational for people it's and that's the beauty of the internet I mean we're so lucky but especially you know we can really one person that that's what that film is all about was just this one guy and almost he had like the the it was almost like an act of God people thought that people didn't know that he did it most people didn't know except this one guy and people are like what is going on like they thought it was like an act of God that this forest came back wow in the middle of nowhere it was just like that's great and then it just showed what one positive person could do and like one positive person can outshadow I feel like a thousand neutral people that are just kind of living their life and getting by and that's really like once all this positivity starts spreading and people become like that and you know working on projects like what you're working on then I think it's just gonna and then they get into the food and the clean and people start having babies and they want their kids to eat clean food that's like a big deal now so it's huge it's huge I think I'm really I'm really hopeful I don't know if it's going to be in the nick of time or what but depending on you know finances and things because people are really having the screws put on right now with the cost of food and you know everyone's still really getting sick and it's just like this big double whammy and people are losing their jobs and so really for me like the whole food forest idea was such a such an answer to all of it and it just takes you out of that whole game you know like if you want to play the game you can but you don't have to because you have your food forest and I can just see it catching on and all the foodies and the hipsters getting into it and yeah it's perfect how much was it how much does land sell for in Detroit I mean it's pretty I've heard some low prices like thousand dollars two thousand dollars three thousand dollars for I mean for a pretty rundown house well yeah yeah but you got the land at least yeah but the houses are still livable I mean that's cool with some some elbow grease you could yeah really I mean there are really nice houses you know I went to this one in in California and it was a real long backyard and there was the main house and probably 10 people lived in this house I think they call it the east house and it's in Los Angeles and the backyard is a forest garden oh really that someone I mean they planted a lot of citrus and avocado maybe like 10 15 years ago and then now there's new stuff kind of going through and throughout the backyard there's little one bedroom pods that people have built underneath the canopy so it's like these little it might be a like a kind of a tent thing but it's always waterproof and they use like reclaimed materials and it's like there's 10 people living throughout the backyard in these pods that's a cool idea I don't know what they do for the restroom I think maybe there was a composting toilet kind of like a corner or something and there's a shower but everyone had their own space and they're able to support like 20 people on that property and their goal was to they thought about this year they were going to get there where they their food costs would be almost zero because they're doing a lot of bulk buying in together and then they run a csa out of their place where the farmers will bring all the stuff and then they distributed all out of that place and then the forest garden in the back so they're thinking that's a really great concept they're looking at supporting 10 to 20 people on can't be more than an acre it's a big property but it's long and it used to be horse like a horse track part of it yeah so i was wondering how fertile it is if you know all the horses probably pretty pretty yeah more so than most more so than most i mean they're probably getting some manure but that's a really good idea because they're also living there so that's kind of a key with forest gardening is you have to you have to be there to take care of it that has to be a caretaker yeah um so if there's people living in it that's like perfect that every day they're they're taking care of their plants and yeah the garden is like totally tended it would be perfect yeah living in these things and you know visit someone in the next pod and hang out and have breakfast and that's great yeah it's kind of like a building off that i don't know if you've heard of this tiny house concept yeah yeah these like less than a thousand square foot houses that people are building putting them on trailers and like doing all this really interesting stuff cool but it's really touching on so that's kind of like building on that it's like the kind of post-industrial tiny house forest garden movement yeah yeah really it makes perfect sense too because i think sometimes people want to get the real big houses but there's just so much upkeep and oh it's yeah oh yeah it doesn't seem as appealing as it used to i'd rather just have many small little pods and then a communal space for the kitchen and the bathrooms and stuff or whatever but keep it small and simple yeah and then and then individualized where people can tailor it to their own spot and then you're just dealing with leaky roofs and all this stuff with these big houses it just seems like a trap to me it might be a blessing that some of these houses are dilapidated and they can just start fresh and yeah you can scrap a lot of the material yeah i guess it and there's actually a mission another spot in michigan and traverse city which is northwest michigan uh there's actually a company that they take uh materials from demolition sites so instead of demolishing the building they literally take it apart and then they resell that material yeah um it's probably at a reduced rate but they're selling it to people that are building stuff and it's really like really working out like good it's a very successful model because there's so many resources someone in detroit has got to be working on something like that yeah yeah and it can kind of come become an addiction when you get into collecting the resources because you start seeing gold everywhere you see like a pile of leaves on the corner and somebody getting rid of like um i've seen like a matrix a mattress pad or not a pad but like the box the box frame yeah and it was all like wood and like a trellis yeah i was like well you could take that and apart in a couple pieces and make a trellis and i mean there's stuff everywhere yes there is you know dead branches on the ground can be chipped up and you know people don't value it like permaculturists do yeah that's with our clients that's one of the biggest things is like kind of along the lines of like mentoring instead of like telling people what they need to do but instead of like drawing them to to to those conclusions on their own so like giving them these hints and then they get these aha moments so we've been doing some education to kind of bring people to those realizations to see that when you're throwing out your bag of leaves you're throwing out a lot of fertility or like when you mow your lawn and same thing bag it up bag up your lawn clippings you're getting rid of a lot of fertility and yeah and then composting is like a huge one so many millions of tons of food waste just get thrown in landfills that's like and that's probably enough raw material to make compost to like for probably every farm yeah small farm in america i'd imagine i would think so i mean there's so much waste so i i feel like there's a lot leverage with composting and the very simple things that we can do anyone can compost even in the city in the city it takes a little more adaptation you need to use different systems but it's very very possible there's actually a woman i would say at chelsea or sorry union square market yesterday and there's a woman who collects food scraps and yeah composting material and then she sells it back to the public because people don't want it and they're excited about someone else doing something with it so there's i mean that's a big that's a big one yeah because once we have compost we have fertility and then we have plants and once we have plants we're good yeah yeah once the cycles started yeah that's the thing um you want to talk about let's um let's go to a break we're going to talk about usgoldcoins.com and that's 1-800-HOTCOIN Andy Goss is the man uh he has been my trusted advisor for investments in rare gold and silver coins for a long time now um to check him out his book Uncle Sam cooks the books is a masterpiece and should be read by everyone and mezzi grill mezzi grill is authentic Mediterranean food they now serve breakfast they're on eighth avenue and 55th street in New York City and they're just south of Columbus Circle and they're on the clean plates edition of New York City as well very cool and then we've got mount gox which is online exchange services for bitcoins they now take euros British pounds and Australian dollars Canadian dollars are coming soon very cool very cool awesome awesome well let's talk about let's um let's talk about some of your favorite items that you'd want to plant like if someone comes to you and they maybe say let's we'll we'll each give our top five okay so and you're in a northern climate as am I but um maybe we'll do some southern options too but let's say someone wants to know your your favorite five or ten okay so if you have if you have uh good sun okay relatively good access to irrigation water or rainfall top five would for me be American persimmon which is either a small medium or very large tree and it can be pruned to be either of those three okay so American American persimmon cool um red current okay interesting and as a side note to that all currents black white and then gooseberry we'll slide that in there yeah yeah um so the ride is genus yes um our IDES yep um and then comfrey okay yeah comfrey is definitely on top five um comfrey is an amazing nutrient accumulator compost plant amazing medicine yeah um definitely hazelnuts okay and or chest nuts okay um and for the fifth one hmm it's so hard to choose yeah really um so many i would have to say fresh strawberries cool straight from the garden in june is like yeah that's beautiful yeah so those five nice off the top of the dome yeah yeah gosh there's so many uh i like the yeah the american persimmon that's cool to bring that up because not many people even know that it exists no that even persimmons exist yeah it's i mean some people know asian persimmons yeah the khaki fruits yep khaki is as they call it in japan um but the american persimmon is a true delicacy and it's uh latin name translates to the fruit of the gods yes which is diro spirals um so it's very custardy not not custardy very carmeline yeah yeah carmeline date like yes butterscotchy sweet jelly like very sweet very high in sugar very nutrient dense um and just absolutely amazing ripens and around october yeah um you don't even have to pick the fruits they fall to ground when they're ripe wow um you can dry them you can make pudding ice cream brownies cookies all these amazing treats nice with the american persimmon and they're just that sounds great there's actually a story i've heard uh family uh 1930 maybe actually subsisted mainly off of their american persimmons during a drought year arab is a bad crop year because they hang on the trees so long and they're so calorie dense that they were able to harvest enough through the winter to have enough sustenance wow so that's good to know for persimmons and save the seeds yeah yeah and that's a really good one to know because coming from the north you're always thinking about winter survival and nut trees and storage and everything but knowing that there's still good fruits like that that can hang yep that's cool no not every year they won't hang but it's common for that to happen yeah uh i was in california and there was a um asian persimmon and it was like january already but it's it was california and a lot of them were just super ripe just hanging on the thing just squishy you know you just pop it off and eat it i couldn't believe it it was so so we picked like 80 80 or 100 persimmons yeah and they were all just so nice and then they were you put them in the fridge and they ripen slowly and you know it's it's a nice staggered fruit yeah yeah they store really well under uh cold storage real well i mean it's surprising because i think cuz they're so high in sugar yeah interesting so what are your top five well i would probably go with uh hazelnuts and i planted most of my hazelnuts two years ago so i'm just kind of waiting for them to really fill out and do their thing um probably comfrey i guess you know i would say white clover too because white clover is just such a lover is great yeah it's still low maintenance lawn you know and and wherever i walk like my pathways the flowers never really form but everywhere else the flowers come up and then it's maybe this high off the ground it may be a little more sometimes and it's just um super lush and wow the bees just go crazy very fine and you can mow it maybe three times every summer you know starting from maybe june until september or something give it a snip and get all the old flowers off and it just keeps feeding your bees it's really great and what's nice is you can plant it in the ditches and like no one really even knows that it's there but it's almost like you're turning your public property the public property in the ditch into useful food for the bees and you know it fixes nitrogen so i like rhubarb a lot too yeah i mean it's solo maintenance and then it comes it's one of the first ones in the spring to really kind of leaf out and where i'm at minnesota it's almost like mother's day and things are still pretty brown i mean they're they're leafing out they're coming but but your rhubarb is like one of the first ones it's already looking really nice gosh maybe and i'm waiting for this one to come in too the sea buckthorn the sea berries i think that would be great because it's a nitrogen fixer and it it's able to you know put out a nice berry um otherwise you know once they get big i think the korean nut pine would be yeah i'm going to be really happy that i planted those and once they're coming but they're they're still they're like this and i'm just kind of they're slow trying to egg them on and you don't know what else you can do you know to make it click quicker and uh currents you know i've had a lot more success with black as far as the deer damage okay like the deer have not touched the black currents maybe a little nibbling but they will beat up on the reds still for some reason and the josteberries they'll beat up on the josteberries like is the black herring has such a strong scent yeah yeah if i don't like that yeah even the leaves they don't like i mean or they'll just nibble the buds in the fall or in the winter time they'll just kind of nibble on the on the buds another one that i like is the nanking cherry because the deer don't like it and that's really and it puts out a very early flower kind of like a june berry it's one of the first ones that's the thing like in the at the highline park in new york city yeah i saw the they planted most of those because it's an early ornamental right right right i don't even think they they did it for the wildlife value or the food value but that's one of the first things to leaf out and flower really pretty so in the spring time after a long winter it's nice to see and the nankings are totally like that i think if they knew about nankings they'd plant them because oh yeah and it's more of a full sun variety they say but my parents planted maybe six of them in our driveway and it's under an oak canopy and there's maybe about four hours a day of direct and the rest is kind of like shady filtered and they're still fruiting really well yeah the nankings yeah wow that's encouraging so i planted a bunch where i'm at and the ones that i mixed in with wood chips like i mixed wood chips in with the soil they're growing like three times as fast as the other ones that i planted in just the soil huh yeah what kind of wood chips were they hardwood i you know i think it was but it was there were some um cypress in there or some cedar i know there were some not a lot not a lot but i could smell some of it and it was just this massive pile of wood chips at the um at a sand pit like a gravel pit and we would just fill up the truck and and i would just mulch everything really heavily and mix it in and then two years later all the mushrooms came up and then um they're just really big they're real big so now i'm just taking out like errant branches you know like cleaning up the branches and they just new growth like crazy so yeah i haven't heard that before the mixing the wood chips in yeah that's cool they really would have responded so yeah i'm just planting more and more hazelnuts i'm planting the hazel birts which is the cross between the filbert and hazelnuts more you know better production with with the cold hardiness still um hardy kiwis once it comes in there's so many man there's yeah yeah i could have topped like 200 probably once you get into it and you know like how well it does and what this is it becomes such an addiction oh yeah if you find a good supplier with relatively good prices i mean it's just like i'm a drug fiend just more plants more plants yeah it's fun it's fun well just imagine when you're like you know like when you're like your parents age for example you're gonna be basking and yeah so much food you you could just let most of it hang because there'd be so much it'd be so much and i think that was that's really the key is to over plant if you can i mean there's limited space whatever but if you can over plant it because you're gonna support a lot more animals oh yeah and then that's just and take your nutrient cycling just really increases and then there's just more for everybody and someone said like the only way to really protect a hazelnut bush is to be something like 500 feet away from the nearest uh other trees because squirrels will just take your hazelnuts or they say just plant a few extra ones and yeah take it easy yeah there's and if you live where there's a lot of oaks i mean yeah yeah there's hopefully enough for yeah that would be a good one too like a nice burr oak nice white oak actually uh earlier when i was in central park i saw a chestnut leaf oak oh which has the um it has leaves that are like a very thin chestnut leaf almost no kidding um but the fruit is though it's in the white chestnut or sorry in the white oak family or group so it has those big low tan and uh nuts great you might want to check those out in the fall yeah maybe a harvestsum and plant them next year yeah it's yeah and now i'm at the point where most of it's been planted so i'm ready to just do stuff like that just planting nuts around and seeing what comes up and just soak them you know it seemed like this guy was planting them nearly year round but i don't know about that it might have been like a seasonal kind of thing yeah maybe in the movie maybe in the movie they yeah they might not have covered it but yeah i don't know but that's like that's probably the best way to do it because that's what happens the squirrel most of the time it's the squirrels burying the nuts and forgetting where they buried it yeah and then that germinates yep um i have that problem not problem i have that i have that advantage in my garden lots of oak trees come up because the squirrels buried them uh-huh the acorns yeah he would always soak them i think that the story was like he would he would sort them out at night and then he would soak them for 12 hours and then when he went out in the morning with his goats he would start planting them and he had like an iron rod and he would just stick a hole in and then cover it in and i think it was maybe like this deep for each one he said wow yeah hmm yeah pretty nuts that's a good show uh are you feeling here with like some of the uh fukuoka stuff the no-till yep yeah that would be cool yeah there's um one of the most recent things i saw related to that was a woman um i forget where she was but she was doing some trialing um trying to do like a production style for vegetables using his methods the no-till and what she did was she tilled the plot and seeded it extremely dense with white clover and i think red clover okay or crimson clover i can't remember one of the annual or biannual uh clovers and then in her planting rows she would just chisel plow the rows so plow up that white clover and she would just plant right in there and then the remaining white clover would basically fill the gap yeah and um next to it she just had a regular plot it was just you know bare dirt um how they would normally do the row crops and she found like that it needed so much less water and almost no weeding and at the end of the year she didn't have to do anything because the clover was there and it was covering the soil so she could just even leave the dead plants there and they would decompose in the next year she would just chop them down as mulch yeah um wow yeah so they're yeah his those methods are those are definitely when it comes to growing annuals i feel like those are very very very powerful because yeah realistically we are going to need to grow annuals to feed humans like oh for sure for the next probably is 50 years or so yeah um so like using those methods i saw really great article in permaculture activists last year um some folks in in portland kind of likes i guess you'd say almost like anarchists sort of guys took all these abandoned lots or like we're able to source these random lots all over and they started like this um grains yesterday and they were growing these heirloom corns and other grains on all these plots so they had like all this food throughout portland uh and then they're able to build enough capital to get us like a seed cleaner and a seed sorter and they're able to get like some storage space so now i think they're at the level where they have like the csa so people buy a share and then at the end of the season they get corn and all this local calories you know that um are being grown in a responsible manner they're putting back nutrients into the soil they're not um just denuding it and moving on to the next plot yeah so there's a lot of there's a lot of cool things with annuals like sometimes i've noticed that maybe like perennials are extremely important but we do we do need annuals like uh just for a caloric equation yeah we need them so like people that are like figuring out these ways to do really creative ways to grow them so that they're not losing topsoil and they're not losing nutrients are really important um i saw another awesome one milkwood permaculture wrote about this on their blog how do you spell it milkwood m-i-l-k-w-o-o-d cool i think it's milkwood.net if you check out their website there's some really awesome stuff on permaculture cool um they wrote about one of their neighbors he does this method of uh cropping called pasture cropping um where he takes a pasture that he grazes with cows or other livestock and he uses a uh yeoman's chisel plow which is a plow that has anywhere from three to five um chisel plows which are about 16 inches long and they're l-shaped plow that are very skinny and so they're not actually turning the soil they're digging into the subsoil and creating these channels that allow oxygen and soil or sorry h2o water into the soil okay and in those channels while he's plowing it he's has a machine that drops the seed in there for rye or or wheat and so he'll do that and then he'll graze the paddock and then those seeds will germinate the grain will grow and in Australia it's droughty so the pasture grass kind of goes dormant but his grains keep growing because they're in those channels and they're getting irrigated uh and at the end of the year he harvest after he harvest they get a rain and he grazes it again so um he's making a living doing that growing grains and also meat so yeah that's something i feel people maybe in more southern climates where they get a little less rain could try that out um so that's kind of the stuff when we work with farmers we'll we want to work with perennials and like alternative cropping systems alternative uh you know things that they can sell but also like improving annual systems improving the annuals yeah because that's huge i mean uh you know 90 percent of the food we eat is an annual so it grows it dies all in one year um it'd be interesting to do like an only perennial diet for a while see if that would be possible yeah if people have done it uh my my friend Ethan he he and his girlfriend they tried to i think they did it for like they tried first for like a month i think they're trying to do like 50 perennial okay i think they're just they're trying to by 2011 have like a 90 80 or 90 perennial diet well so it's totally feasible yeah it'd be more a little more nut-based maybe yeah yeah next time you're at the store buy instead of buying a pound of flour go and buy two pounds of hazelnuts and get creative make all sorts of stuff with them i mean you can coconut stuff coconut products that's perennial yeah coconuts even even tropical stuff i mean if yeah if we can if we can figure out how to transport it all the fruits yeah it's possible it's definitely possible it's true you have to be very creative very very committed open yeah open-minded too because there's so many things and all the other stuff but well very cool um are there any other websites you want to mention before we go just turning some people on to some new ideas anything that you've been into lately lately um yes lately well for the past year i've been getting extremely excited about wild food and foraging basing my diet a lot around wild food and what's available in the wild so i'm actually working on teaching folks how to identify harvest and cook wild foods cool that's kind of my next little mini project great other than that check out our website and none come to my mind that are there's so many good websites if you check out ours we have a resource page that has a good list of stuff that okay we check out regularly and that's roots-to-fruits.biz yep and that's all spelled out r-o-o-t-s-t-o-f-r-u-i-t-s.b-i-z so for any illiterate folk out there um cool very cool um well man thanks so much thanks for having me yeah yeah it's been really cool it's been really cool i look forward you're doing the permaculture convergence yes weekend this weekend in high falls new york okay yeah can you post it on that anyone out there saturdays twenty dollars all public are invited and there's all sorts of workshops and all sorts of cool stuff if you're into learning about more ways to simplify your life and reduce your consumption needs very cool and that's put on by the green phoenix permaculture group yep and a few other folks the northeast permaculture institute cool or the permaculture institute of the northeast which is pine and i believe um finger lakes permaculture institute if i'm not mistaken that'll be great so everyone check that out if possible and check out mark's site see what he's up to and see if maybe he can be of service uh don't be afraid to give him a call and see what's going on thanks so much bro one more handshake very cool i'm anthony anderson and uh see you next time thanks so much cool